FreeBSD is the most popular of the BSDs and is focused largely on the ix86 platform.

FreeBSD currently has two main development branches; 4.9 and 5.2. The first is stable and ready for use in servers. The second is a development branch that will see better SMP support.

The FreeBSD mascot is one that is shared by all BSDs, the beastie. Falsely called Chuck or Charlie by some this daemon is a smiling fellow in large sneakers that has undergone relatively few alterations over the past two decades and has been used on hats, boxer shorts, shirts, jackets, stickers and has been used on a series of pewter and copper statues.

FreeBSD has spawned two prominent derived operating systems; Darwin, the Unix-like underpinings of Mac OS X and DragonflyBSD, a contiuation of the 4.x codebase seeking to completely rewrite the way the operating system uses multiple processors.

noun - primary two

The FreeBSD Project, the organisation that manages the development of the FreeBSD operating system.

The FreeBSD Project has a close working relationship with Apple Computers Inc, they share bug fixes when dealing with the same codebase.

FreeBSD is an Unix operating system like Linux, but much older, more disciplined and more mature. It is faster and more stable for servers, but doesn't have such a wide range of software or such fast-growing support that Linux has. Linux is better if you want to play the games and other closed-source software released for Linux too- like Enemy Territory, UT2004 and so on. FreeBSD deserves to be more popular though, but from these other posts you can see why it isn't. Let's hope they're the minority of FreeBSD fans.

Mr. Newbie couldn't take the abuse and RTFMming of the FreeBSD community, so installed Gentoo instead.

FreeBSD is a stable, well designed, fast POSIX operating system. It has a well organised group of experienced core developers. As a result it is far more reliable than Linux, whose architecture is vastly inferior.